South African comedians renaissance men?

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on August 13th, 2008

Rian Malan, writing for the WSJ.com site, provides a lengthy overview of at least one segment of the comedy scene in South Africa. Malan sets the scene:

After losing power in 1994, South Africa’s white right-wingers withdrew into psychic exile, leaving the chattering classes to pursue a political agenda so correct that it sometimes verged on insanity. Newspapers were soon filled with great billows of soft-left pabulum. Talk show hosts routinely used appalling terms like “gendered” or “Othering,” and almost everyone observed an unwritten law stating that it was unfair to criticize black people on the grounds that any failings they might exhibit were attributable to poverty, oppression and bad education, otherwise known as “the legacy of apartheid.” In time, I came to feel as if I were suffocating in a fog of high-minded pieties, a condition that often reduced me to cursing and throwing things at the TV set.

Into this arid comedy wasteland stepped a group of young, black comedians who are shaking up South Africa and ignoring all the “rules,” jabbing fellow South Africans (black and white) in the ribs and practically forcing them to laugh. On a continent in which nearly every country has ” ‘insult laws’ to protect the dignity of its leaders,” this could be viewed as either very difficult or a piece of cake.

One thing if for certain, it’s not always easy to do comedy while standing on eggshells.

Jokes rooted in pain are nothing new, but it was extraordinary to have a banquet-hall of glamorous black-tied Africans laughing at the notion that South Africa is now in such a pitiful state that even they might want to flee. Is this not a sign that they’re transcending victimhood? “Learning to laugh at yourself is a great sign of human evolution,” says Kagiso Lediga. Jews and the Irish went through the process generations ago. Black Americans made the critical breakthrough in the seventies. Indians followed suit about 10 years later, and look at them now — rising giants of international trade and authors of every third work on the West’s best-selling book charts. Take this as a joke if you like, but I think the crew might foreshadow a similar renaissance in Africa.

Thanks to Terry Reilly for the heads up!

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